Did you miss Zia Consulting’s strategies for maximizing your content services investments at this year’s ASG EVOLVE20 event? Read on for the recap of our content breakout session, and the five ways to maximize your investments that you’ve already made in your content services platforms.
1. Modernize IT Systems & Digitize Core Organization Processes
We’ve had the opportunity to interact with customers who are running systems that might be as much as a decade old or more. In many cases, today software evolves so rapidly, if you’re running on something that’s maybe 18 months old, that’s old. Speaking in terms of years is something that can be immediately addressed.
How can you get on the current versions of your software and take advantage of what’s available to you? We won’t presume to characterize that as an easy task, but organizationally, modernizing IT systems and digitizing core organizational processes is something to consider.
If you’re still dealing with paper, we can help with content chaos. Not sure where to start? Try an Initial Consulting Engagement.
2. Automate Business Processes
We worked with a regional insurance carrier, who I think were surprised to realize that their claims processors were making physical copies of the files that they worked on. Two to seven people touched the file throughout the process of the claim from from beginning to end. The supporting material was dozens or even hundreds of pages of material.
On top of a digitalization challenge, they had an automation challenge where they weren’t able to share that information in a meaningful way and be confident that each person had access to the right, current information relevant to their claim.
Think carefully about your business processes. Where can automation be useful? The example I gave is a sneaky one, right? Automation wasn’t what they set out to do. They didn’t call us and say we print too much. They called us and said we have a challenge around running an older system, and we have a digitization challenge.
Don’t assume that automation is a scary word. It doesn’t mean that mailroom employees can be laid off as soon as automation is implemented. In this case study, there was opportunity for employees to move into other functions or take on additional responsibility that was not necessarily available just because of the amount of manual processing they had to do. Automation can be a way to maximize your investments.
3. Integrate and Innovate
Along the way, our customers ask if we’ve integrated to one system or another. Sometimes the answer is a resounding yes. Many times it’s a system that is 20 years old, that nobody’s ever heard of, or has long forgotten, or a proprietary system. Every project has integration in some form or fashion.
What would make your lives better by way of automating your business processes? Don’t write off integration as too expensive or too difficult to accomplish, because that won’t necessarily be the case.
Read more on innovation in this blog post by our colleague, Principal Solution Engineer Ernie Bahr, who speaks on micro and macro changes you can employ to maximize your investments.
4. Automate Compliance and Governance
We’ll spare you the acronyms and talk about the regulations that are requiring these things. I’ll simply say that this is something that is no longer optional. In our business, the customers that we’re interacting with are moving past the point where they’ve got a definition of governance or records management policies. The penalties for not doing so are astronomical and not something that they can ignore any longer.
Think about your investments and by protecting your information, you’re protecting your business. There are some key strategies to employ to gain that level of automation and achieve the compliance and governance that you know you need.
5. Leverage Analytics and AI/ML
These are key areas of innovation in our industry. It is rare for us to work with enterprises that have truly taken advantage of what they have. We recognize that they have a great deal of power, a great deal of value in the form of their information.
What does your lineage look like? Where does your data come from? How accurate is it?
Where are there opportunities for reduction? Am I duplicating processes, and not taking advantage of the infrastructure that I have in place? Every organization, of course, is going to be different.
These are the ways to maximize your investments, but they’re not linear. Ways of maximizing your current ECM investments can happen in the order of your priorities. Zia can create a blueprint of how to get there and which strategies to use.